Collaborative consumption, as explained in What's Mine is Yours, is a move away from the hyper consumerist model of over-buying to one of sharing and thrift. The basic difference between previous ages where lean times demanded the conservation of resources is the advent of the Internet.
Trust the Basis of Collaborative Consumption
Access to the world wide web has meant that the possibilities of exchange - goods, information, and ideas - have positively exploded. Look at sites like eBbay, where fussy collectors can find virtually anything. The reason for the success of these sites is something missing in many modern day commercial relationships: a close trust developed between buyer and seller. As authorsRachel Botsman and Roo Rogers write, the idea of a business model where you send complete strangers money and they in turn send purchased goods back, would have seemed like madness twenty years ago. But sites like eBay and Zopa show how brilliantly this business model can work.
Even more amazingly, this model of buying and selling has moved into the area of finance. The website Zopa hooks up lenders and borrowers and cuts out the banks all together. While the idea of lending money to complete strangers over the Internet seems insane, the system works and has a miniscule default rate compared to the banks. Again, trust is built up person to person, or to use the jargon "peer to peer."
In a world awash with too much stuff, the possibility of swapping and sharing seems almost limitless. Instructively, the first part of the book outlines how we got to this point of over consumption. Self-storage is now an industry that is growing exponentially, a glaring example of how we are drowning in too much stuff. The ethos of collaborative consumption is a move away from such buying for its own sake, and a move towards finding online communities and partnerships where goods and services are shared or bartered. The good news about this emerging economic paradigm is that not only does it save money and conserve resources, but it fosters the development of trust and relationships. In short, collaborative consumption leads to happiness and well-being. It fosters creativity in the way it goes about finding solutions for the consumer and is environmentally more responsible.
Criticism of What's Mine Is Yours
What's Mine is Yours is certainly an inspiring book, and its authors Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers do an excellent job of giving the reader an intelligent and considered examination of the myriad of online possibilities for collaborative consumption. The book, however, tends to be a bit too optimistic. In a cheery final chapter, the authors state that collaborative consumption may be the start of a new economy.
Yet on any reading collaborative consumption would surely shrink the economy. Collaborative consumption also has no real industry that actually produces goods. Rather it relies on moving a lot of existing stuff around the world. The book places enormous faith in the gee-whiz world of information technology. The future, according to What's Mine is Yours, belongs to the movers and shakers of the Internet. He or she who invents the next phone app shall rule the world. The CVs of the authors are full of abstract job descriptors such as "social innovators" and "serial entrepreneurs."
These are minor criticisms. On the whole What's Mine is Yours is packed with great ideas that should spur individuals to pursue a more creative and community-based lifestyle. If anything, What's Mine is Yours is a good companion book to Bill McKibben's Deep Economy, a book that promotes the idea of local economies. These two books read together perhaps provides a way out of the high consumption society we now live in.
What's Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers. Published by Harper Business. ISBN: 978-0061963544
Chris Saliba - Chris Saliba is a freelance writer. Read more of his workplace articles at chrissalibafreelancewriter.blogspot.com
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